In this instalment of our occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we look to Tokyo and how its people manage to be civilized on overcrowded public transport

A stout middle-aged woman stared at me, stone-faced, as I pleaded with her to shift her legs enough for me to take the subway window seat. She was an aisle sitter. By blocking the path to the window, these creatures hope to get two seats for the price of one and ride in relative luxury.

“I am not putting up with this!” I shouted at the woman’s unmoving face. “Do you think you’re riding on a first-class Metropass?”

But what is the point of recounting such a mundane encounter? Everyone knows the North American transit rider is a boor — blocking, pushing, spitting, burping, farting, spilling, playing at being a DJ, using the outside voice inside. My friend who believed she had a Platinum Elite Metropass was not even the rudest rider I encountered that week: That prize goes to the man who shamelessly picked his nose and wiped it on the seat next to me. As humourist Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times,
“Respecting shared public space is becoming as quaintly archaic as tipping your hat to a lady, now that the concept of public space is as nearly extinct as hats, and ladies.”

Whether you believe it’s a growing problem or an old one, it’s clear that many Torontonians using public transportation haven’t figured out how to behave in public. And increasing population density combined with sluggish transportation policy are pushing Toronto toward an awkwardly crowded transit future. Suddenly courtesy ceases to seem like a quaint relic and more like a necessary skill for the future. I fear we’re not ready.

Who is? Who could teach us how to live harmoniously in a sea of humanity? The Japanese.

Flash forward to Shibuya Station, a major transfer point between various subway and commuter train lines in central Tokyo. It’s the closest thing to a human beehive you’ll ever see. Thousands of people stream through the perplexing warren of corridors, tunnels and concourses. There is no bear-left or bear-right rule for walking: You look straight ahead of you, pay attention and take responsibility for not bumping into anyone. It’s an admirable approach.

The trains themselves are relatively quiet and impeccably clean. Japanese etiquette forbids eating or talking loudly on the subway. Cellphone-free areas and women-only cars add to the general air of calm and order.

Let us govern ourselves well, and continue to confront the aisle sitters and nose pickers. If the TTC itself won’t or can’t enact a broken-window approach to transit etiquette, ordinary citizens must

Signage is everywhere. Posters disapprove of loud music seeping out of headphones, sitting with splayed legs; posters even warn the over-refreshed against wobbly drunken walking. If a behaviour is annoying, sooner or later a Tokyo train station poster (probably employing cartoon characters) will take a stand against it.

Most remarkable is the system Tokyo commuters obey to line up for subways. When the station is truly jammed locals know the immediate next train will be too full to accept the people who have just arrived on the platform. They form orderly lines to get on the second or third one. In other words, people don’t line up for the next train, they line up for three trains from now. All of this is choreographed with coloured lines and numbers by the platform’s edge.

Hijime Sato, deputy manager of international affairs for Tokyo Metro, explained via email that the system originated at Shibuya as a response to extreme congestion during the Second World War. “This method of forming lines and waiting to get on the train later spread to other stations and railway operating companies,” he wrote. Aisle-sitting, meanwhile, doesn’t happen in Japan because the most crowded train lines only have sideways-facing benches, not forward- and backward-facing seats.

While there has been at least one stabbing prompted by a person-on-person collision at Shibuya, the normal penalty for violating Japanese etiquette rules is simply to be stared at by one’s fellow riders. Worse, a flustered obasan (grandmother) may tell you what’s what. I learned this when I used a luggage rack for a backpack that was too big, and thus likely to fall over.

Good transit behaviour extends to every corner of Japan. During an organized tour of the country through G Adventures, a company based in Toronto, the group relied exclusively on public transportation, from high-speed intercity shinkansen trains to funiculars that creaked up mountainsides. Nowhere did we spot any rudeness.

For a frightening sight, look up Torontoist’s slideshow of the Bombardier Flexity streetcars that will roll into service next year. Some of the seating is arranged in fours, with passengers facing each other in what looks like knee-knocking proximity. Torontoist called this “a good way to meet your neighbours,” ignoring the fact that we have already met our neighbours and they are often scumbags

As we zipped on the shinkansen from Odawara to Tokyo, I asked the tour leader where he thought Japanese politeness originates. Childhood, said Axel Deroubaix, a Frenchman who’s lived in Japan for four years. “Why does it work here and not somewhere else? It’s not in the DNA … it all has to do with education.”

Sato, the Tokyo Metro spokesman, confirmed this theory: “In Japan, primary schools and junior high schools have programs of moral education in which all students are taught about various things, including courtesy,” he wrote. “Also, when taking a school trip or going on an outing, teachers strictly tell students to behave, not to be loud. [They] say, ‘You must not disturb other people!’ In this way, they learn to behave in a courteous manner from a young age.”

Back in Toronto, whatever is to be done about transit etiquette must be done soon. For a frightening sight, look up Torontoist’s slideshow of the Bombardier Flexity streetcars that will roll into service next year. Some of the seating is arranged in fours, with passengers facing each other in what looks like knee-knocking proximity. Torontoist called this “a good way to meet your neighbours,” ignoring the fact that we have already met our neighbours and they are often scumbags.

Whether you believe it’s a growing problem or an old one, it’s clear that many Torontonians using public transportation haven’t figured out how to behave in public

Chris Upfold, the TTC’s chief customer officer, sounded a pessimistic note about the potential effectiveness of such measures. “There is relatively little that transit agencies can do to influence some of those [rude] behaviours,” he said in a phone interview. Take my nose-picking compatriot, for example. “You can’t honestly believe that … an admonishment from the TTC is going to affect that guy’s behaviour,” Upfold said.

The TTC does have programs in place to encourage a basic level of civilization, although efforts have diminished since the 1990s salad days of “walk left, stand right” escalator placards. Announcements remind people to give up their seats for pregnant and elderly passengers. Stickers identify priority seating areas. The “I don’t belong here” poster campaign urges people not to litter, if only to prevent track fires.

Upfold said the TTC is mainly relying on riders ought to obey the Golden Rule. “We would ask all of our customers in all circumstances to be aware of the people around them and remember that we live in a society and we’re all supposed to be civil to each other.”

It’s up to us, in other words. Let us govern ourselves well, and continue to confront the aisle sitters and nose pickers. If the TTC itself won’t or can’t enact a broken-window approach to transit etiquette, ordinary citizens must.

Since returning from Japan, I have become a more mindful rider. I confess that I used to eat on transit. I can’t bring myself to do it now. It just feels wrong, and I don’t need a poster to tell me it is.

In this instalment of our occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we suggest the city follow Brussels’ lead in promoting childcare.

Dewlyn D’Mellow, an on-air personality for Rogers TV, has been enjoying the last of her year-long maternity leave with her first-born son, Markus. Thanks to the province launching full-day kindergarten, she can enroll Markus in school when he’s four, but a decision has yet to be made about who will look after him for the next three years.

“I’ve been Googling like crazy, asking all my friends who have kids what to do,” D’Mellow says. “My husband and I still haven’t figured it out.”

Like most new moms in Toronto, she is dreading this three-year gap between maternity leave and kindergarten. Daycare fees and wait lists are a huge issue — the cost for childcare can be prohibitively expensive, and those who qualify for a subsidy must get in line behind 22,000 others.

The obvious solution here is increased funding (a 2007 report by the OECD ranks Canada 39th out of 40 countries for its public spending on childcare), but there are steps Toronto can take without relying on the provincial or federal governments for cash, and a perfect place to look for inspiration is Brussels.

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Belgium doesn’t actually spend much more than we do on childcare — about 0.8% of their GDP, compared to our 0.2% — but the French, Dutch and international expats living in its capital city have a different approach to raising their young, both on a logistical and socio-cultural level.

Timing-wise, new moms return to work after just 15 weeks of maternity leave and pre-school begins when a child is two and a half years old (much like our kindergarten, this is free to parents). This means parents only have a two-year window during which to fret about childcare, and that mothers are pumping money back into the economy much sooner. Because of this structure, there’s a keen societal awareness of the ties between affordable childcare and a strong economy, as well as an firm belief in early schooling.

Overhauling our system to mimic Belgium’s would require massive legislative changes, which aren’t going to happen any time soon. But it’s worth taking a closer look at the importance Belgians place on education and communication about childcare. The value, for instance, placed on early childhood educators and the resources made available to guide new parents through the process of finding care for their babies are just a couple of the things Toronto can take notes on and adopt.

One of the best starting points for English-speaking residents in Brussels is the Brussels Childbirth Trust (BCT), an organization that provides assistance to pregnant women and new mothers, connecting experienced parents with those navigating the system for the first time, in need of recommendations for a good crèche (nursery school) or a list of important dates to keep in mind for preschool registration. Its website offers links to local pre- and post-natal yoga classes, as well as registration for its regular Pregnancy in Belgium evenings, a kind of support group.

Sandra Drechsel, president of BCT, and her husband moved to Brussels from Germany five years ago to work as an interpreter. She has two young children and found raising them in this city to be an easy, fulfilling experience, as long as she was following the “schedule” for what to do, and when.

“Everything is pretty straightforward,” Drechsel says. “Of course, we always find minor problems, like you have to register your child for preschool on a specific day, or maybe you don’t like a certain teacher. But as we would say back in Germany, it’s complaining at a very high level.”

Drechsel believes part of what makes the system work is how goal-oriented everyone is — women return to work earlier, kids start school earlier — which helps stimulate the economy. But she also says grandparents and other extended family are more involved in childcare. Every Wednesday, French schools in Brussels close for the afternoon, which should send parents into a panic. Yet, it doesn’t.

“Some mothers find a way to rework their schedules,” she says, “but you always see lots of grandparents in the parks and playgrounds at this time, helping out.”

In Toronto, you’re more likely to find nannies in the playground, which isn’t a bad thing — but it might reflect a different perspective on childcare in general.

“We don’t necessarily value our elderly, nor our children, like those in other cultures do,” says Amy Underwood, an early childhood educator at St. Bartholemew’s Children’s Centre, a daycare in Regent Park. “Funding is important, but there needs to be an attitude shift as well. I’ve come across a lot of people who think what we do is glorified babysitting. They don’t understand how childcare affects development, how it boosts the economy.”

Altering the public’s views on organized childcare largely comes down to exposure. A good place to start is offering better resources to new moms. In Brussels, government and non-profits have ensured both locals and the international community are catered to when it comes to learning about crèches and preschools: BCT is geared toward English speakers, the Office de la Naissance et de l’Enfance (O.N.E.) serves French parents and Kind en Gezin helps out the Dutch.

Here, there’s Children’s Services, the Toronto Coalition for Better Child Care (an advocacy group) and the newly formed Toronto Child and Family Network, but not many parents are familiar with the roles these organizations play, let along how to interact with them.

D’Mellow says she was bombarded with helpful information during her pregnancy and received an educational package about breastfeeding and vaccinations, but then it came to a halt.

“I would have loved a Toronto-centric guide or a chart that outlined all of my options for childcare here,” she says. “Over time, I figured out that certain programs do exist — OHIP, for instance, covers physiotherapy once a week for infants, so we have a person coming to our house to do stretches with Markus, for free.” But she didn’t realize this until months after he was born; it was her pediatrician who, during a visit, recommended she sign up for the service.

“The moment you’re pregnant, our health-care system is supporting you,” says Jane Mercer, executive co-ordinator at the TCBCC. “Then you have the baby and a public health nurse visits, and then it’s like, ‘Good luck with that, you’re on your own until your child is in school.’ ”

Mercer says the City of Toronto’s website offers a good breakdown of childcare options available in each ward, but it takes a while to investigate all the options and there’s no centralized system for getting on waiting lists. Furthermore, the webpage itself could stand an upgrade.

But Elaine Baxter-Trahair, manager at Toronto Children’s Services, says it’s hard to justify investing in improvements to the site or simply boosting outreach to new parents in general when there are thousands of low-income families desperately awaiting subsidies. It always comes back to funding, and “any time you cut anything related to children, it’s controversial,” she explains. Hence, managing those subsidies and funding new daycare spots will always take priority over distributing promotional material.

And as far as public perception is concerned, Baxter-Trahair disagrees with Underwood. She feels the advocacy groups have done a good job of shifting how we view the role of childcare workers. Mercer supports this, arguing, “The public is now solidly behind the need for childcare because we understand how it contributes to a strong workforce, both now and in the future.”

She may be right. But it’s unclear how much we value the sanity of our new parents — and while throwing money at childcare is undoubtedly necessary, it’s equally important to make smaller gestures of support for mothers such as D’Mellow. Let’s start with a better website, at the very least.

In this instalment of our occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we look to Berlin and Philadelphia to see how they promote public art.

In Toronto last weekend, grown adults could be found spooning with human-shaped mounds of grass, new immigrants were taking part in a high-five championship and teenagers perched on skateboards watched a robotic chair collapse and then rebuild itself — they were so eager for it to succeed, they started chanting, “Chair! Chair! Chair!” as it finally raised itself up again into full form.

It was Nuit Blanche, of course, and a prime example of how Torontonians of all ages and backgrounds want to engage with public art. The problem is that it only happens once a year. For the other 364 days, we’re left with the gallery scene (which can be intimidating), theatre and music events (which can be expensive), and urban art — graffiti, paper-and-paste murals and sculptures — which is more accessible and, for many, the “gateway” to our city’s arts scene.

Though Toronto’s street art is far from lacking, it could use a boost. Never mind New York and London, it’s places such as Berlin and Philadelphia that offer plenty of inspiration for how to create an art-drenched cityscape without a ton of
resources. The process involves reaching out to artists of all backgrounds and skill levels, adopting policy that encourages street-level art whether commissioned or not, and reevaluating where funds are coming from.

“In Toronto, there are a lot of blank canvases,” says James Gen Meers, co-producer of an upcoming documentary called Between The Lines, about street art in the wake of Mayor Rob Ford declaring “war on graffiti” last year. “In Berlin, you see prolific graffiti everywhere.”

Indeed, since the wall came down in 1989, Berlin has steadily cultivated a reputation as one of the world’s top art destinations. It boasts the highest concentration of practising artists in the world (about 5,500 of them) and the second-highest number of galleries (450), after New York. The cultural affairs department spends more than $25-million annually on a total of 27 arts funding programs, while each neighbourhood also has its own separate budget for local projects.

Walk along the streets of Kreuzberg, in former West Berlin, and you’ll encounter massive wall murals — a mix of paint, paper and glue — around every corner, usually by renowed street artists Blu, Roa, Vhils or Ash. There are so many sites that a new mobile phone app, Street Art Berlin, has just been developed to track each piece; 42-year-old artist and tour guide Uli Schuster is behind it.

“Berlin is a city of gaps and industrial ruins, which is like an open invitation for artists,” he says. “In most of Western Europe, almost every square metre is owned by someone and has a specific use or design, so there’s no space for change … and street art demands space.”

It also demands a relaxed approach to vandalism. While the majority of Berlin’s largescale murals are commissioned works, there are plenty of others that are illegal — prosecution, however, is unlikely. This means tagging is prevalent and you’re likely to see labour-intensive, politically motivated pieces alongside random scrawled names. But, all together, it makes the streetscape bold and colourful.

The artists — many of whom create street art one day, then work on private commissions the next — are drawn to Berlin for a number of reasons, the most important being that rent is dirt cheap. Miriam Bers, an art historian with GoArt! Berlin, explains: “The city understood in the early ’90s that its creative people would be the ones to boost the economy, and so the government decided to let artists live and work in all the empty buildings in the eastern part of the city during the restitution process, which is ongoing today.”

Obviously, these are different circumstances — Toronto isn’t dealing with vacant apartment buildings and reunification. However, there appears to be a different approach to both making and experiencing art in Berlin, and it’s something we might try to mimic.

Alice Gibney is an artist who grew up in Toronto, earned her MFA at Parsons in New York and then moved to Berlin to work. The 30-year-old describes the art scene there as “down to earth” and eclectic, “like do-it-yourself meets established galleries meets guerilla performances. It always surprises, and it’s very accessible. Berlin has the energy you find in New York, but with more space and slowness…. No one is focused on how much money you make, but rather what impact you’re making intellectually and creatively. And the turnout at art shows is huge, which is really exciting.”

She is quick to clarify, however, that Toronto isn’t a dead zone when it comes to art or the number of people who appreciate it. The Art Gallery of Ontario’s programming has improved, she says, and there are new galleries opening all the time, “but the general atmosphere is more conservative.”

The AGO, to its credit, might be trying to change this — its latest artist-in-residence is Mark Titchner, an edgy, Turner Prize-nominated artist from London who has just begun work on a large-scale mural going up on the west side of the Drake Hotel. This project is being executed in conjunction with the Oasis Skateboard Factory, based out of Scadding Court Community Centre, and the AGO Youth Council; it’s also a collaboration with the city’s new StreetARToronto (StART) program.

StART was launched this year to replace the roughly 20-year-old Graffiti Transformation program. Its main objective is to tackle vandalism (illegal tagging, for instance) while supporting the creation of high-quality street art, whether that’s a mural painted by schoolkids or a more challenging Banksy-esque piece. Its funding hasn’t changed — the annual budget is $325,000, which in 2012 has been distributed to 23 projects — but the aim now is to “meet the new needs of street art in the city” and better reflect a new bylaw that allows graffiti on private property if the owner agrees to it.

“Street art is a new phenomena,” says Elyse Parker, who is part of the team managing StART. “So the question is, what should the role of the city be in dealing with it? Certainly we’re not out there reviewing every piece of art that goes up, nor should we be. But what gets painted on city streets is something all of us have to experience. So we’re focusing on art as a vehicle, getting artists involved to raise the level of street art across Toronto, hoping it sets an example for others to follow.”
In other words, if more buildings, bridges and tunnels are covered in high-quality murals with fewer examples of tagging, this leads to more of the same — better street art, less vandalism. It may sound like shaky logic, but this is where Philadelphia comes in.

Back in 1984, Philly launched the Mural Arts Program as part of its strategy to combat illegal graffiti. Local muralist Jane Golden was hired to reach out to those in the underground arts scene and try to redirect artists’ talent into mural painting from tagging. It was a huge success — socially, economically and aesthetically — and the city now boasts more than 3,000 murals, while its related art education programs help thousands of at-risk youth in cultivating their talents.

“We’ve made some connections there,” Parker says. “Certainly, in terms of what Philadelphia has been able to accomplish, it’s been a great model — they have different funding structures and legal structures, so it has to be something that works for Toronto, but we’re excited to learn from them.”

Gen Meers echoes Parker’s enthusiasm for Philadelphia (which also launched North America’s first public art program in 1959), but is critical of StART, which he says requires signing waivers, providing contact information and completing other paperwork that many street artists are hesitant to do. Essentially, he says, when street art gets bureaucratic, it gets problematic. His co-producer, Kelli Kieley, agrees, pointing out this can “interrupt the organic creative process that is street art. … I think the city should consider a more integrative approach.”

While they’re at it, the city might also want to speak to its planning department about the Percent for Public Art mandate, which was approved by council in 2010 and “recommends that a minimum of 1% of the gross construction cost of each significant development be contributed to public art.”

In other words, condo developers have to cough up funds for art that everyone in Toronto can appreciate. In theory, this is a good thing. But the art is always the same: A red canoe by City Place, a big thimble at Spadina and Richmond, a pair of what appear to be giant, wrought-iron testicles at Queen’s Quay. Some of it is fantastic, iconic even (Michael Snow’s The Audience bursting out the side of the Rogers Centre) but public art shouldn’t be relegated to fanciful sculptures that complement buildings. These may help the city achieve its “clean and beautiful” goal, but aren’t always challenging fare for audiences.

Ultimately, as Gen Meers puts it, “there’s so much the city could do if it stepped up its game.” What’s reassuring is that many people involved — artists, bureaucrats, average citizens — are doing just that. Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, for instance, recently enlisted mural artists to paint on the construction hoarding boards near Allan Gardens, which will remain in place for three years. It’s not officially part of the StART program, nor does it have to do with Percent for Public Art, she just did it and it works.

Peter Kingstone, a visual arts officer at the Toronto Arts Council, which is funded by the city and saw a record number of grant applications this year, believes small initiatives like this have an important snowball effect. The more art there is in the public sphere, the more people engage with it, the broader our definition of art becomes and the more we’re willing to spend on it.

“We’re trying to engage a more visual culture here,” he says. “There’s a palpable desire to look at things, to get out and experience art in the community. And I think all that should lead to more pressure to fund the arts. The problem is, everyone seems to want art, but no one wants to pay for it.”

In this instalment of our occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we wonder if Houston’s ﬁxed-fare taxi system could work here.

Hop in a cab in Toronto and, before it even starts moving, a $4.25 charge comes up on the meter. Ride all of five kilometres, and it’ll cost at least $13 before tip. We may not be a world-class city, but our taxis are more expensive than those in New York, Los Angeles or Paris, thanks mostly to a series of fare hikes over recent years, the last one being in 2010 when HST was squeezed into the price.

The prohibitive cost of taxis is just one deterrent when it comes to using this mode of transportation. Even for those who may be able to afford the luxury, there’s the stress of uncertainty about precisely how much it will add up to: The same journey might cost $10 one day and $15 the next, due to a range of variables including weather, construction and traffic congestion.

Although simply lowering the fare would be nice, it isn’t going to happen — the politics and policies of the taxi industry are far too complicated to attempt any backtracking now. However, there may be another way to get more bums in cabs, and it’s just as straightforward: flat rates downtown.

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A single fare for any ride within the downtown core — no matter how many people are travelling, no matter how lost the driver gets, no matter what the shifting variables — would give riders, as well as taxi companies and their employees, the comfort of certainty. A fare that’s fair to all parties involved means a more reliable alternative to public transit and a more efficient use of resources, with fewer cabs idling at street corners or roaming around with an empty backseat.

Logistically speaking, implementing such a change to the system isn’t as difficult as it may sound — at worst, it would require an amendment to a city bylaw, an awareness campaign and new signage on the inside of each taxi. The real challenge lies in finding that magic number, the dollar figure that makes both the industry and its customers happy at the end of the day.

For inspiration as to how all of this might come together, look at Houston, Tex. In 2006, the city launched a program called Six in the City, making all taxi trips within its downtown core $6.

“The motivation for us was to increase tourism and economic activity in the central business district,” explains Chris Newport, an information officer with the city of Houston. “We’re definitely an automobile town — we’ve got really immature public transit — but no one was used to taking cabs for short trips. Mostly they were used for service between several different commercial hubs.”

It took about eight months to gather research, facilitate dialogue with local taxi firms and modify an ordinance before the initiative could be rolled out, but it was a relatively smooth process.

“At the end of the day, on the mechanical implementation side, we’re really just talking about one cash transaction and an altered information sheet posted inside the cabs, so it wasn’t too stressful,” he says.

Other U.S. cities with taxis operating on fixed-rate zones include Indianapolis, Atlanta and Miami. Fixed fares range from $5 to $19 depending on the geographic boundaries.

This past spring, Toronto resident Rachel Kagan was attending an environmental conference in Houston for work. She only made use of Six in the City a few times, but it left a lasting impression.

“I didn’t think much of it at the time,” she says, “but when I got back home I thought, ‘Why doesn’t Toronto do this?’ I take cabs all the time here, but the fares keep going up and it doesn’t seem right to pay the amount that we’re currently paying; you go one block and you’re at $5 already.”

After speaking with a couple of cab drivers here who seemed receptive to the idea, Kagan started an online petition at Campaign.to, with hopes of making flat-rate taxis in Toronto a reality. Joshua Errett, who runs the website, shares the belief that such a program would only benefit the city.

“If we make cabs more affordable, we make them more accessible,” he says. “And with better access, there are more people taking them. So whatever revenue gets lost in fares is made up by the volume.”

It’s a logic that Bruce Robertson, director of licensing for the city of Toronto, understands. In fact, he’s paying special attention to such ideas while the Licensing and Standards Committee conducts its comprehensive review of the taxi industry — after 15 consultations with industry representatives, the general public and interested stakeholders, a final report is expected by December.

“The law basically says that when you get in a cab, the meter goes on and the fare is determined by the distance and time,” he says. “So partly because of this, Toronto has not considered any [fixed-rate] plan to my knowledge. But yes, a program like this could be implemented. … The roadblocks aren’t necessarily that huge, but we would need to have buy-in from the industry.”

This is where it gets slightly difficult. According to Diamond Taxi dispatch manager Brian Lattanville, it would be impossible to find a rate both customers and drivers would be pleased with.

“If you’ve got a $4 run, customers don’t want to pay $6 for it,” he says, “and people here know if they’re getting ripped off — they know how much it should cost to go from A to B. Drivers wouldn’t like it, either, because they often have customers who want to make stops en route and it takes more time.”

In short, he says, it’s not going to work. And in some respects, he may be right. Toronto is a different beast than Houston: Defining the borders of our downtown is a lot trickier (Houston’s central business district is enclosed by three major highways); we have more options when it comes to public transit and greater walkability, which can render cabs superfluous; and we have different legislation in terms of how the industry is licensed — that is, how taxis are owned, rented and managed.

And yet, our two cities are side-by-side when it comes to gridlock. An oft-quoted study compiled by Dutch researchers and the makers of TomTom GPS systems this year showed that Houston had the eighth worst traffic congestion on the continent; Toronto came in ninth. So perhaps the issue of traffic complicating the fairness of a single flat rate is less of an issue that it may seem.

There’s also the gratuity to consider — Kagan says her fellow taxi passengers in Houston tended to tip more than one might in Toronto. It could be due to the custom in the U.S. of adding 20% to any bill (instead of a more modest 10% to 15% here), but if the rate in Toronto was set at $8, for example, many customers would surely be content to round up to $10.

As far as Newport is concerned, Houston’s commitment to a flat-rate taxi scheme was an easy decision to make and it’s something he feels other cities, despite their differences, could quickly implement.

“We encountered some criticism at first, which was to be expected,” he says. “But it was pretty well-received and I don’t see us putting an end to it any time soon.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/a-proposal-for-prix-fixe-taxis/feed/1stdTaxi-cabsMaking the best of the würsthttp://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/making-the-best-of-the-wurst
http://news.nationalpost.com/toronto/making-the-best-of-the-wurst#commentsSat, 26 May 2012 12:33:35 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=176918

In this instalment of our occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we say it’s time we do as the Viennese and embrace our street meat.

When actor John Malkovich noted that some Vienna sausage stands carry vodka, he suggested to a vendor that they add caviar to the menu. One of them actually did, which says a lot about how freewheeling street meat can get over there.
While quite different in other respects, what Toronto and Vienna have in common is sausages are the cities’ default street food, thanks to tradition and municipal fiat. However, popular consensus has condemned the Toronto street dog, rightly or not, as an embarrassment and menace to our health, whereas Vienna’s würst (sausage) is celebrated as a tradition, a tourism highlight and a source of local pride.

This month I travelled to the home of the wiener (Wien is the German word for Vienna, and wiener means “Viennese”) to eat würst 11 times in four days, hoping to learn how it’s done from a city at peace with its street meat. The sausage itself is not much better on the other side of the pond, but the Viennese advantage lies in bureaucratic flexibility and a certain panache.
If we truly want our carts to serve winning wieners, here are a few ideas we ought to steal from the original Wieners.

Tastier sausages!
In Vienna, there are so many varieties of sausage that I needed the help of a tour guide, hired by the Vienna Tourist Board to show me around, in choosing a 3 euro käsekrainer for me at the Heisse und Kalte Würstwaren stand, a sort of a hole in the wall in the vaguely Kensington-esque Naschmarkt area. It was yummy: meaty with little bits of melty cheese and a springy texture.

The sausage arsenal is different over there, with most würst a perceptible notch above Toronto’s, and no more. But there are varieties worth adopting. What we call wieners are frankfurters there, in honour of the Frankfurt-born butcher who is said to have invented them. They’re served in pairs since they’re so skinny, and taste much like our own but with a snappy casing. My most delicious sausage was a “currywurst,” which appeared to be a bratwurst — beefier and less chunky than the kind we have — covered with tomatoey curry sauce and sprinkled with turmeric. It was satisfying.

In Vienna, you can order your sausage as a “hot dog,” served in a hollowed out French-style roll, or the traditional way, chopped and served on a paper plate with a big squirt of mustard and a hunk of bread on the side (rye or crusty kaiser).
Still, often in Vienna you’re stuck with ketchup and mustard for condiments. I came to miss our wide array of fixings. And Viennese sausages are prepared on a griddle and sit in their own juices; I prefer the char that comes from Toronto’s grills, even if our street meat can taste of gasoline.

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Challenge palates
When Malkovich swung through Vienna in 2011 to portray Austrian murderer Jack Unterweger in the play The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer, the actor developed a street meat habit. “He made a joke: ‘Now I’d like some caviar.’ So we thought we could try,” says Thomas Danecek, a partner in UBox, a würstel (sausage) stand that opened this month in central Vienna. UBox’s flagship offering is a cheese sausage with a side of baguette smeared with orange and black fish eggs, for 15 euros. As a publicity stunt it has worked, Danecek says. In the execution, sausage and caviar was interesting, but quite salty.

How about horse? At the würstel stand at the Hoher Markt, I learned that pferde leberkäse refers to a bologna-like, but more subtly spiced, horse sausage. Admittedly, this could be a tough sell in Toronto, but Toronto’s two major hot dog suppliers — Soloway’s on Richmond Street East and Champs at King and Widmer — have in recent years added new forms of tube steak to their lineups: jerk chicken, smoky cheese and all-beef spicy halal dogs, for example.

Marianne Moroney, who also serves as executive director of the Toronto Street Food Vendors Association, sells these and more. Her cart in front of Mount Sinai Hospital is a sort of ad hoc, one-off pilot project undertaken with the blessing of Toronto Public Health. Ontario regulations changed to allow a greater range of street foods in 2008, including salads, burritos, baked goods and a host of other items, with an allowance for new foods as long as a medical officer of health approves them. But municipal staff have to sign off on each vendor’s menu changes, and Toronto’s public health inspectors are refusing to do so until a street food working group makes recommendations this summer. Only Moroney managed to squeeze through the bureaucratic tangle and get a few non-sausage items approved.

“Within the confines of a little, tiny hot dog cart,” she explains, she serves baked potatoes (white and sweet) and sandwiches — peameal bacon, prime rib, sometimes pulled pork — made with vacuum-sealed meat prepared at Barberian’s Steakhouse. Moroney offers game sausages as well, such as bison and elk.

“Are you willing to try some wild boar?” Moroney asks customer Constance Cooper during a 6:30 p.m. rush on Wednesday.
“I’m game,” Cooper puns. After taking a bite, she says: “I don’t like wild meats but this is good. You don’t get that wild taste. Huh.”

Winning Torontonians over to new meats is a one-by-one process. While her jerk chicken sausages sell out every day, most of Moroney’s customers ask for the traditional choices (hot dogs, Polish sausages, and so on). “I would never give up my hot dogs and sausages,” she says. “They pay my bills.”

Add alcohol
Vienna wiener stands offer beer, wine and even spirits. Domestic beers such as Stiegl and Ottakriner are the popular choices, but luxe options pop up: The Bitzinger stand at Albertinaplatz sells Moët et Chandon for about 20 euro a small glass, for example.

Could it happen here? “No. Not under the current regulations,” says Sylvanus Thompson, quality assurance manager for Toronto Public Health. But if a group presented a persuasive case to the Liquor Licensing Board of Ontario? “Well, anything could change,” he says.

Beautify stands
The Viennese love to talk about how the late opera singer Luciano Pavarotti used to rush over to the Bitzinger würstel stand behind the Staatsoper (city opera house) for supper after singing. Visit the stand today and you’ll encounter a sleek black metal box with gold-coloured embellishments. Opera, sausages and the marriage of culinary tradition with contemporary design: It doesn’t get more Viennese than that.

Viennese würstel stands are kiosks as opposed to carts, and many are attractive. The new UBox a colourful, clean-looking
prefab structure that, in accordance with Viennese law, is not permanently anchored to the ground. Danecek, its part owner who also happens to be an opera singer, explains: “We made a würstel stand, but for how it should look in the 21st century.”

In Toronto, Moroney met this week with Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and a member of Ryerson University’s design faculty to discuss a possible student contest to come up with a new look for Toronto’s utilitarian street carts.

Regardless of where that leads, no vendor wants to pour money into a hot dog stand in a city that has often been hostile to them, Moroney explains. That brings us to the most important thing Toronto must do to improve its wieners.

Know what we want
Politics have made the Toronto street dog an endangered species. A moratorium on new licences in downtown wards 20, 27 and 28 came into effect in 2002, and Moroney says this has pared the number of vendors in the city to around 100 from 300 a decade ago.

Vienna is smaller than Toronto, with 1.7 million residents to our 2.6 million, and has 157 sausage stands with 106 kiosks selling other foods.

There’s no mistaking Vienna’s fondness for its würstel stands. The city’s tourism board prominently features the stands on its website as something to visit. And no one’s trying to play nanny there. “Vienna [accepts] street food the way it is. We make no difference between healthy and unhealthy food,” writes Hengl Alexander, a spokesman for the city department responsible for street food, in an email.

When construction pushes vendors aside in Toronto (on Bloor Street and in front of Union Station, for example), they are often prohibited from returning to their old spots afterwards. As Moroney explains, the uncertainty makes vendors reluctant to invest in their carts, new menu items and so on. Sausage reform is a project that must start at city hall. Politicians and many among the public may want street food that goes beyond the hot dog, but vendors will only experiment beyond that profitably popular food if they feel their livelihood stands on solid ground.

Now that the ashes of the miserably failed A La Cart program have cooled, the political will to improve our street food choices has returned. Councillors Wong-Tam, Adam Vaughan and Josh Colle have come out in favour of liberalizing the hot dog regime, for example by allowing carts to set up in parking lots and to finally sell a wider range of foods. A city staff working group has spent the last year coming up with recommendations for changes, which it will present to the Licensing and Standards Committee next month. Toronto’s street food revolution could finally arrive this year. Street stands in Vienna also sell kebabs, pizza and stir-fried noodles, as they may in Toronto soon. If they hope to compete, our dogs will have to do new tricks, as those in Vienna have.

In the meantime, Vienna’s sausage stands enjoy a monopoly on feeding snackers after midnight. “That is how it is in Austria. The old laws change only slowly,” says Danecek, reminding me of home.

In this instalment of our occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we look at the role jitneys, or shared taxis, play in transit systems.

In Mexico, they’re called peseros. In Israel, they’re known as sheruts. There are tap taps in Haiti, matatus in Kenya and maxi-taxis in Romania. Here, in North America, shared taxis or minibuses are often referred to as jitneys, and it’s a term with which Torontonians should get familiar, because they might be an unexpected solution to our ongoing transit and congestion woes.

Mayor Rob Ford has been vocal about wanting to put an end to Toronto’s “war on cars” — so he, especially, may be interested in how this unique type of car service could actually help the city’s traffic flow better, regardless of what happens with the LRT or subway lines.

Jitneys, now most common in the developing world, first sprung up in Los Angeles during the early 20th century with the rise of privately owned automobiles. When trolleys were too crowded or too infrequent, frustrated passengers would simply hop on the running boards of a passing Model-T to get to their destination. Often, a nickel was offered to the driver as thanks — jitney is an old slang term for a 5-cent piece, which is how this alternative mode of transportation got its name.

As demand for jitneys increased, streetcar operators began to see their revenues plummet, and it wasn’t long before federal legislation was passed to prevent any kind of share-taxi from operating (or at least making any real profit). By the ’40s, they had essentially faded from the scene.

But now, almost a century later, cities coping with massive gridlock — Toronto, as the fourth most congested city in North America, is one of them, costing the nation more than $5-billion annually according to our Board of Trade — are beginning to re-evaluate the advantages of such a service.

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The modern-day jitney is half-taxi, half-bus. Usually a minivan or similarly sized vehicle that carries up to a dozen passengers, it operates on busy thoroughfares but doesn’t necessarily have fixed stops or schedules. The jitney simply picks up riders as they come, and will often deviate from a route in order to drop someone off at a requested location. It can also drive to areas that buses don’t service at a cost that’s much cheaper than a taxi, thus benefiting lower-income communities.

“I actually spoke with Rob Ford about bringing jitneys to Toronto,” says Igor Toutchinski, a producer with the Russian Canadian Broadcasting organization who ran for city council (Ward 10, York Centre) in the last election. “He said, ‘It’s a good idea, but we have to talk more.’ ”

Part of Toutchinski’s campaign revolved around improving access to transit for those living in North York and other GTA suburbs by offering shuttle services between these neighbourhoods and the closest TTC station. Riders would pay around $3 or $4 for a one-way journey, and would be picked up anywhere along a predetermined route — somewhat like a school bus for grown-ups.

“Taxi companies have minivans, which don’t get used very much, and they’ve told me that they’d be more than happy to participate in such a program,” he says.

Toutchinski is convinced it would work because he’s seen similar operations in Ukraine, where he was raised, and has heard a lot of praise about the sheruts in Israel, which make regular commutes between the occupied West Bank and Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, through checkpoints, 24 hours a day.

It’s because of these share-taxi systems — regulated or not — that fewer cars are on the road in many of the world’s largest cities. It also means the people living there have more options for their daily commute and more varied prices.

With significant environmental and economic advantages, it may seem unusual that jitneys don’t factor at all into the transit debate in Toronto. But one major reason for this is a municipal by-law.

“When it comes to taxis,” says Bruce Robertson, director of licensing for the city, “the law is that once a fare commences and the meter goes on, it can stop and pick up someone else, but only if the first passenger agrees to it, and the driver isn’t allowed to charge a separate fare.”

This law would apply to jitneys, as long as they were privately operated. Still, Robertson thinks the idea “has merit,” especially if it were developed with the TTC.
“It’s not out of the realm of possibility,” he says. “We’ve had discussions in the past, which unfortunately haven’t been fruitful, about a taxi service linking up with the TTC, having cars going around picking people up in the morning and taking them to a bus stop or subway station.”

To make this a reality, there would have to be collaboration between private taxi companies, the city and the TTC. To satisfy all parties involved, the routes, stops and fares would have to be set in stone, which in many ways goes against the operating principles of a true jitney service.

Still, it would be worth trying, even if the process took a few years and the end result felt more like a makeshift extension of TTC bus service than anything entirely new.

If discussions were to start up again, a good place to find inspiration would be Miami. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck the city, leaving many people scrambling to find ways in and out of downtown. The municipal government set aside US$46-million as part of a contract for jitney service. Within two weeks, 20 jitney firms were running on 12 fixed routes in Dade county, and 46,000 passengers were using them each weekday.

A U.S. Federal Transit Administration study found that during the time jitneys were legal in Miami, almost 20,000 fewer cars were on the road. And yet, despite these benefits, the local government elected to ban privately owned share-taxi operations in order to protect its public transit.

Today, jitneys can still be seen on the streets, but they are heavily regulated, running as part of the city’s Metrobus system.

David Roosevelt Lawrence mourns the loss of Miami’s “real” jitneys. Currently an economics student at Yale, he created the website JitneysNow.com while he was still in high school. He acknowledges that one major barrier to getting jitneys operating in North America today is the persistent fear that they’ll steal business away from taxi drivers and leave bus, streetcar or subway operators out of work.

“But when governments and transit monopolies can’t adequately connect people from their homes to their jobs, other forms of transit shouldn’t be forced out of the market … I think there needs to be a willingness to accept competition in the interest of achieving a more efficient system.”

Toronto blogger and transit advocate Steve Munro believes that share-taxis make sense in certain cities, but the GTA is too spread out, with different origins and destinations all over the place.

“People are going from everywhere to everywhere, which makes it much harder,” he says. “There’s also a big difference between a jitney-type operation downtown, where there are lots of people travelling short distances, as opposed to up on Sheppard Avenue, where the trips are longer. The question is, how many of these jitneys are you going to need to make a serious dent in the demand, and would people pay [higher] fares than the TTC to travel long distances?”

It’s difficult to answer these questions without conducting extensive public surveys and pilot projects, which require a fair sum of money, which nobody at City Hall wants to spend right now. As it stands, financial constraints and current regulations at all levels of government are the biggest impediment to launching any sort of jitney-esque service here in Toronto. But as Lawrence says, the bigger challenge arguably has to do with creating public awareness.

“People don’t really know that there are possible supplements to existing forms of transportation,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to spell out ‘jitney’ in conversation.”

In an occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, we look at Seoul’s success with reclaiming and restoring hidden waterways.

Correcting public infrastructure blunders made more than 100 years ago doesn’t sound glamorous; it definitely doesn’t make for a rousing political platform. If a councillor wanted to spend public money digging up a creek that was unnecessarily buried in 1880, the idea would almost certainly get shot down. After all, when Torontonians think about how to improve our urban spaces, attention is paid to what we can see — roads, buildings, bridges — not what’s below the surface.
It’s unfortunate, though, because digging up our buried waterways — a trend known as “daylighting” — is gaining a lot of traction in cities around the world, and Toronto shouldn’t let itself get left behind.

The most compelling example is the Cheong Gye Cheon river in Seoul, South Korea. In 1940, the 5.8-kilometre stretch of river, which runs through the capital city’s downtown core, was filled in by the Japanese government and covered with asphalt to form the base of a highway. Later, beginning in 1968, a second highway was built overtop, resembling Toronto’s Lakeshore-and-Gardiner piggyback configuration. Until 2005, this corridor carried more than 100,000 people to and fro each day.

About a decade ago, the Korean rags-to-riches sensation Lee Myung-bak ran for mayor of Seoul and won. A central part of his election platform was the resurrection of the Cheong Gye Cheon river. On his first day in office, he began assembling the plans to get this project underway. Dr. Lee In Keun, currently assistant mayor of infrastructure for the city, remembers this time vividly.
“The entire process took only 27 months,” he says. “We worked very fast, around the clock, removing little bits of the highway piece by piece until the river came back.”

He makes it sound easy — and in some respects it was, in that the process literally just involved removing chunks of road and digging up a river that already existed. But of course, there were challenges along the way, especially the problem of diverting traffic.

“Everyone was worried about that,” Lee says. “But the advantage was Seoul had been building a subway network since the 1970s and we’d expanded it to eight lines by 2000. So by the time the river project was underway, we had enough public transit to alleviate congestion. We also introduced various new policies, such as reserved lanes and mandating that people only drive on certain days.”

As well, Seoul’s population had begun to stabilize by the early ’90s at around 10 million people and, in turn, its rate of development was slowing down. This meant the city’s government needed to shift its focus, prioritizing “restoration and sustainability,” as Lee says, rather than building more stuff.

At a total cost of $380-million, paid entirely by the city, the river project was considered a huge success and received international media attention — Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has since published a book about it called Deconstruction/Construction. The resuscitated Cheong Gye Cheon improved local air quality, reduced noise pollution, attracted a variety of birds, insects and fish back into the area, became a gathering point for community events and increased surrounding property values. The visionary behind this project, Lee Myung-bak, is now president of South Korea.

“It’s amazing,” says Jessica Hall, a senior associate with Los Angeles-based firm Restoration Design Group who specializes in watershed rehabilitation and runs a blog called Creek Freak. “The Cheong Gye Cheon is really the poster child of daylighting right now.”

Hall says she first heard the term “daylighting” in 2000, when she was in the process of mapping hidden streams and creeks in L.A. The notion of uncovering, or re-culverting waterways back to their original state was viewed by most engineers as a step backwards.

“I think it’s because, for years, engineers have been schooled to look at natural waterways as the enemy, or at least something to be controlled,” she says. “They’re often seen as a nuisance — a dangerous place for kids to play around, or a thing that gets dirty and polluted.”

Indeed, sanitation and public health concerns were the primary motivation during the late 1800s for covering up Toronto’s creeks — from Garrison to Taddle — as inhabitants upstream would often use them as open sewers, much to the irk of those living downstream.

But the infrastructure created decades ago to transform these naturally occurring waterways into controlled sewer systems is starting to wear down. Pipes are degrading and there is greater pressure on treatment facilities as the city’s population (and density) increases.

“By daylighting them, you’ll never have to deal with pipes again,” he says. “As soon as water starts interacting with soil and plants, an incredible amount of metals and other pollutants get removed, which means less work for sewage treatment plants. And it all happens naturally.”

The benefits are obvious to James Brown, a principal with Toronto architecture firm Brown and Storey. Back in 1994, his company was given $10,000 by the Waterfront Regeneration Trust to come up with a proposal and feasibility study for the daylighting of Garrison Creek. The final plans, which can still be viewed on the firm’s website, include a series of surface rainwater ponds along the Garrison’s winding path from Christie Pits, through Bickford Park and down to Trinity Bellwoods.

“We were trying to create a connected system, a network,” Brown says. “Imagine joining everything from Christie Pits all the way down to the new Fort York pedestrian bridge, where it ends, like a whole ravine system you could walk through, independent of the city above.”

Initially, there was a wave of community support for this project, and it was endorsed at the time by Councillor Dan Leckie, who was gaining recognition then for kick-starting the Toronto Atmospheric Fund and the Task Force to Bring Back the Don. But his attempts to convince others at City Hall that daylighting the Garrison was a worthy investment fell on deaf ears and, as Brown puts it, “we didn’t get the political support, so nothing happened.”

There are signs, however, that Toronto’s approach to managing both its natural and constructed waterways is shifting. The new Sherbourne Common, for instance, which is slated to become part of the East Bayfront community now being developed by Waterfront Toronto, boasts an artful display of fountains, waterfalls, ponds and streams that will eventually be fed by stormwater collected on-site — the features themselves, which include biofiltration beds and sedimentation, will filter the water before it returns to the lake, easing pressure on nearby treatment plants.

Michael Cook, the author of a blog about Toronto’s sewers and watersheds called Vanishing Point, believes this new park is a good sign of what’s to come. As he writes, it “celebrate[s] a hydrologic cycle that the last century-and-a-half of stormwater policy has done its best to bury and obfuscate from the public’s experience of urban living. We have spent a lot of money channelling water down into dark holes, never to be seen again; Sherbourne Common … brings it back up for us to see.”

As well, plans are moving ahead to naturalize the mouth of the Don River in order to re-establish wetlands that were lost 100 years ago while creating flood protection for more than 1,000 homes and businesses in the Port Lands, Leslieville and South Riverdale.

If these projects are successful, perhaps it won’t be long before Toronto officials start paying more attention to other rivers and creeks, including the hidden ones waiting for a chance to be in the spotlight — or at least the daylight — again. Fortunately, these waterways aren’t going anywhere.

In an occasional series about what Toronto can learn from other cities, it’sl suggested we take a page out of New York’s book and market this town as it’s meant to be sold.

The tourists got scarce after the World Trade Center fell. After Sept. 11, 2001, New York’s hotels were filled to just two-thirds of their usual occupancy rate. The tourism bureau, NYC & Company, had to give Broadway tickets away. A 10-year low of 35.2 million visitors came to the city in 2002, as reported in a recent New York magazine piece that chronicled the city’s remarkable tourism turnaround over the past decade.

Led by a passionate Mayor, New York bounced back. Its tourism industry now employs a reported 320,000 people, boasts 90,000 hotel rooms and welcomed 50 million visitors in 2011. While head counts are tricky to compare, the money tells a tale: Tourism generates a reported US$47-billion in annual spending in New York, vs. $4.35-billion in Toronto.

“New York is clearly in a league all on its own,” concedes David Whitaker, CEO of Tourism Toronto. (As in New York, Toronto’s official tourism body is not a city agency but a not-for-profit controlled by industry stakeholders.)

Toronto and New York move in different circles, it’s true. While the latter is a top world destination and a brand everyone is familiar with, Toronto has to content itself with doing relatively well as a second-tier major North American city. But it could always do better.

Toronto’s hotel occupancy rate of 68% in 2010, for instance, was well behind New York’s continent-beating 81%. Still, Toronto had the sixth-busiest hotels in North America. While rubber-tire tourists from the States are less common than in the past, Toronto is more than compensating by attracting more visitors from overseas.
Gabor Forgacs, who teaches in Ryerson University’s department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, is skeptical of Toronto’s long-term potential. He argues it has relatively few top-calibre attractions compared to New York. “They have a lot more going for them. It’s a more mature destination.”

Perhaps 30 Rock was right: Toronto is “like New York but without all the stuff.” In that case, building tourism in Toronto is a long game: It will take decades for the city to have enough stuff to rope them in by the tens of millions. But New York’s playbook offers some tourist-luring moves we can steal in the meantime.

MORE THOROUGH ONLINE EVENT LISTINGS
Toronto Tourism’s website is far less comprehensive than New York’s when it comes to cultural event listings, making it look as if there’s less going on here than there actually is.

DROP THE TAG LINES
“I ❤ N.Y.” belongs to New York State, not New York City. The city itself pointedly has no tourism slogan. It doesn’t need one. Given Toronto’s history of lame tourism catchphrases, we should ditch them, too.

HAVE A MAYOR WHO’S A BELIEVER
Michael Bloomberg has made it a mission to boost visitor numbers, and has put money where his mayoral mouth is. His administration gave US$66-million over five years to NYC & Company last summer.

For its part, Toronto’s economic development department actually takes money from Tourism Toronto to fund programs — $500,000 in 2011.

We requested an interview with the Mayor about his tourism vision last week. Rob Ford’s office referred us to Michael Thompson, chair of the Economic Development Committee. We discussed the coming Ripley’s Aquarium and unfolding plans for the Waterfront, but if there is an aggressive strategy to shake things up and promote Toronto as New York has done over the past decade, no one at City Hall is vocalizing it.

“The Mayor recognizes the benefits of tourism,” Thompson says, “and supports Tourism Toronto.” If so, he could afford to be more conspicuous about it.

TELL THE WORLD WE’RE FUN NOW
Just as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani combatted images of dangerous, grimy New York with his famous broken windows policy, Toronto can fix its ho-hum image with a conspicuous pro-fun policy: Extend last call to 4 a.m., scrap pointless, anti-fun regulations and generally encourage the city to let loose. If Ford can get a message out to the planet, he should tell it the old, dour Toronto is giving way to a jolly one. “Toronto today is very, very, very different from the Toronto of 10 years ago,” says Whitaker, who moved here from Miami five years ago to run Tourism Toronto.

ENLIST THE STARS
New York’s Just Ask the Locals ad campaign persuaded the likes of Diddy and Robert De Niro to lend their image to the cause of New York tourism. Toronto’s celebrity pool isn’t as deep, but local creative types might be pressed into constructive service. Sarah Polley, would you fancy directing a tourism commercial?

The most helpful thing local artists can do is romanticize Toronto. People visit New York so they can shop for shoes where Carrie Bradshaw did. We need more Toronto stories à la Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

FOCUS THE BRAND
Toronto’s image as marketed is a cosmopolitan but bland mush, revealing little distinct character to distinguish us from the likes of Chicago, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

Toronto ought to focus on a few things we do well and promote the heck out of them: The CN Tower, Kensington and affordably delicious ethnic foods come to mind. Our events are a draw above anything else, particularly TIFF, Luminato, whatever they’re calling Caribana these days and Nuit Blanche.
Tropes such as multiculturalism and St. Lawrence Market aren’t nearly as special as we think they are and should be sidelined in promo materials.

Ryerson’s Forgacs insists our museums are nothing to write abroad about, either. “We should create attractions that others can’t compete with or don’t have a lot of,” he says. He suggests more one-of-a-kind attractions, such as a museum of telecommunications.

But Toronto already has museums featuring ceramic arts, textiles and shoes, respectively. Having unique offerings won’t bring in many visitors if we forget to trumpet them. This brings us to our final point — the most important thing we can learn from New York.

COP A PROUD ATTITUDE
Other than the fact that it’s brutally difficult to get around, why apologize for Toronto? It can boast of swish new hotels and enough restaurants and cultural events to keep a visitor well occupied for a week, while offering foreign visitors a jumping-off point for exploring the eastern half of Canada.

More fundamentally, cities exist in part to expose us to novelty, and Toronto offers more of it than any other Canadian city. Our compatriots already think we walk around calling Toronto the Centre of the Universe. We don’t, but why not? Let’s drop the modesty and embrace our special role at centre of this country’s cultural life. New York didn’t get to be New York by admitting Chicago is pretty nice, too.
So say it proudly: “Toronto is the most exciting city in Canada.” Say it often enough and they will come.